If you feel overwhelmed by all the “new year, new me” stuff, you’re not alone. While the new year can be a great time to reflect on the past twelve months, it can also be a time when all the feelings you’ve been repressing over the last year come together and make you feel like you’re failing at life. The flood of “new year, new you” messages may remind you of the goals you made 12 months ago that didn’t go the way you wanted, the things you didn’t get to do, and the life you thought you’d have by now.

If you feel like you “failed” this year (or the last two years) because life didn’t look the way you thought it “should”, you weren’t as productive as you wanted to be, you didn’t get to do the big thing you were planning, or you felt like you didn’t do anything well, now is a great time to pause, breathe, and reframe.

First, if you are reading this, you have survived two years of a global pandemic.

Let’s not discount how much strength, resilience and adaptability that took.

You didn’t “fail” just because life threw a million curveballs at you.

You pivoted. You persevered.

It’s like you never played baseball before and suddenly life was hitting a million glass and rubber balls your way… fast.

You prioritized the glass balls so they wouldn’t break.

Maybe some dropped, but you did the best you could while adapting to a new game with new rules.

That’s amazing. You’re amazing.

Maybe life doesn’t look the way you thought it “should” by now, but this is a great time to ask yourself who decided what that timeline “should” look like.

Ask yourself why you feel the need to start over and become someone new every year. Where is this pressure to set goals and change all the things about yourself and yourself coming from? Pay attention to your “why”. Are these your goals or goals you feel like you “should” have based on what society says your life “should” look like? Do these goals align with who you want to be or what you think you “should” do.

As you reflect on the last year, I challenge you to find the smaller wins, to acknowledge all the ways you became stronger, and to celebrate yourself for all the progress you’ve made, even if it doesn’t look the way you thought it “should”.

Rather than seeing 2022 as an opportunity to start over and “fix” all the things you hate about yourself, I challenge you to approach chasing goals as a way to become even MORE awesome than you already are. In case no one’s told you today, you’re not broken and don’t need fixing.

Remember, who you are is SO MUCH MORE than what you accomplish, what your body looks like, or the friends you have – your worth is not defined by any of these things. You are enough exactly as you are, and have SO MUCH MORE strength and resilience inside of you than you even know.